Sam’s random musings

Design Review Tips:

(Via Bug Bash.)

Xcode Animations and Transitions:

Ever wanted to be able to use fancy transitions and animations in your Xcode applications? This series provides the method and the means to implement terrific flips and ripples throughout your app, showing window transition effects using undocumented and documented Objective-C code that can be implemented anywhere quickly and efficiently.

So this is a nice first look at adding some really nice gravy to your next app. Every app needs some special sauce these days to stand out, and for your app maybe this will help…

Technical Q&A: Finding EXC_BAD_ACCESS bugs in a Cocoa project:

QA1367: Discusses how to find memory protection violations or EXC_BAD_ACCESS bugs in Cocoa projects.

ok now this is a good start, ok not really that helpful. Really all is says is that if you get this then you lost track of your reference counting, but doesn’t really help you find it, just how to avoid it. So if it is too late what do you do, CocoaDev.com to the rescue.Debugging Autorelease. This has saved my sorry reference mis-counting butt more then once.

(Via Apple Developer Connection Cocoa Headlines.)

tixe.framework - Cocoa Bindings for WebKit:

This would be worth looking into, but on the developers page it says that this binding framework is:

Update: Tixe is becoming a stardard part of WebKit! I’ve been working with the WebKit team to integrate the functionality of Tixe into WebKit. Most of the core features are now in the WebKit nightly builds. I’ll post more information as things develop.

Cool! this will let one bind even javascript to controls, sounds cool.

(Via Del.icio.us Tag: cocoa.)

I Feel Good About Mac Open Source:

Peter Hosey’s comprehensive directory of open source code libraries and apps for the Mac. (Via Daniel Jalkut.)

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Nice list, more interest to coders then normal people

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

mogenerator: Core Data codegen:

Core Data, like its Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) ancestor, offers to represent your persistent object instances as classes of a generic data class (NSManagedObject in Core Data, EOGenericRecord in EOF) or a custom subclass of the generic class.

This looks to be the beginning of a great tool for those of us who are getting quickly addicted to the the Core Data stuff

(Via rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed.)

Best. Template. Ever.:

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long, long time, is set up some custom project templates in Xcode. The problem is, it doesn’t really take that long to tweak all the little things in a new project, so when I’m in the mood to start something new, I usually just go through all the grunt steps.

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

My Dream App launches:

Filed under: Software, Cult of Mac, Odds and ends

Phill Ryu’s My Dream App has officially launched today. What is My Dream App? Think American Idol for Mac software, think America’s Got Talent with software developers and no Hasselhoff.

The idea is that non-programmers have ideas for apps they would love to see, but they lack the skills to make them a reality. Enter My Dream App, people submit their app ideas to the contest. The entries are whittled down to 24 and then the visitors of the website vote until there are only 3 left. The remaining 3 will become be developed by a team of a designer and a developer and then become real life products for sale (the person who submitted the idea gets royalties).

Submissions are open until Friday, August 25th.

Oh, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I am serving on the panel of judges for My Dream App (along with Steve Wozniak, Leo Laporte, and Kevin Rose, just to name a few) though I have no vested interest in the contest.

This is cool (one of my favorite parts is that the group has a designer involved. I bet a cool app comes out of this.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)